The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

PRESCOTT – It was more than a decade ago, but James Thompkins remem­bers the night like it was yesterday.

He was only six, the youngest of six siblings. They lived with their mother in a crammed high-rise apartment on the west side of Chicago. He woke up in the small hours that day when she opened the door for his uncle, who stumbled in with a fresh gunshot wound in his leg.

From that moment on, he remembers how trauma and drama were a constant part of his life. The Thompkins were always moving from one neighborhood to an­other, one shelter to the next, and James was always run­ning: running from the cops, running from the gangs, run­ning from the shootings.

That’s how he discov­ered he was fast; very fast. “I was always running away from stuff,” said Thompkins, who attends Prescott High School as a junior. “But I never got caught.”

The jovial, jiving resi­dent of the Jubilee Youth Ranch doesn’t have to run anymore. He left those shadows behind in the streets of Chicago more than two years ago. But now he wants to run, for all the right reasons. As a member of the WP Car­dinals track team, he is running farther and faster than ever.

“ He runs like the wind,” WP track and field head coach Jeff Bartlow said. “He can win the title this year, if he runs it right.”

In his third year with the Cardinals, Thompkins is already first in state 2B in the 100, 200 and 400 meter competitions and recently he beat fellow Cardinal and distance runner Seth Deal in an 800-meter trial, though not by much.

At this weekend’s Pas­co Invitational, attended by the best athletes from schools of all sizes, he came in 8th out of 39 in the 400. He runs it in barely over 50 seconds.

“That’s getting down there,” said Bartlow. Thompkins, whose per­formance has already piqued the interest of several small colleges in the form of scholarship letters, said he wants to run it in 49.

Bartlow and the staff at Jubilee said the troubled urban youth who had never left the city limits of Chicago before he arrived in Prescott, has come a long way in more ways than one.

“In Chicago, he was barely going to school and was making all the wrong choices,” said Mark Hauck, athletics director at Jubilee, who took Thompkins under his wing with the support and encouragement of Rick Griffin, executive director at the youth ranch.

His mother realized there was only one solution. Get him out of there. She put Thompkins’ and his older brother Antonio on the train west to Pasco, where Hauck picked them up on a frigid day in January, 2011.

“Where have you taken us,” Thompkins wondered as Hauck drove through the sage-studded lands east of the Tri Cities and the bare Broetje orchards that day. It may as well have been the moon to him. “Where is everybody?”

As an athlete, Thomp­kins was raw material. He had done some rec foot­ball, a little street basket­ball, nothing too formal.

But Hauck, Griffin and Bartlow soon learned he was a natural runner.

“His body is perfect,” said Hauck, who said the sinewy track jock weighs under 140 pounds. “It’s chiseled out of granite, nicely proportioned, lean and muscular. He has nice long strides.”

In the beginning, Thompkins was terrible, Hauck remembered. “He didn’t know how to race. His form was bad.”

Thompkins said he wasn’t even interested in the sport when he signed up for track that first spring (2011). At prac­tice, he was more in­trigued by the girls on the team, got in trouble and was benched at the first meet.

Then, at the next meet in Colfax, he surprised everyone by smoking the field, including his own, fast-running broth­er, whom he desperately wanted to beat.

“He was killing ev­erybody,” Hauck said.

“We thought ‘Holy Cow, where did this come from.’”

With his mentors’ coach­ing and guidance, Thomp­kins just “got better and better,” Hauck said. And, motivated by Jubilee’s strict­er than-average eligibility requirements, he started to do better in school too, the one thing that didn’t come naturally to Thompkins.

“I got to work for it,” he said. And work for it he did, receiving a scholar athlete award for a 4-point GPA during last fall’s football season.

Thompkins’ explosive speed makes him an excel­lent sprinter, but his best race is the 400 meters in which he paces himself just enough to rally right before the finish line and edge out other run­ners. It’s something he trains for by running behind fellow Cardinals in practice.

Hauck taught him to launch from the blocks as a sprinter the first 100 meters, then reserve his speed and sustain a high pace with long strides in the next 100 meters, pick it up some in the third quarter and give it everything with an all-out sprint in the last.

“I know what to do now,” Thompkins said. “I always catch them in the end.”

That should be no sur­prise for a guy who, as a Cardinal running back, once fumbled the ball, landed on his butt only to get up out of nowhere a nanosecond later, sprint after the other team’s defensive back who already had a 7-yard lead with the pig skin and tackle him on the 20-yard line.

“James knows how good he is,” said Hauck, who noted the runner still goes up and down in practice. “Now it’s up to him. The sky’s the limit.”

As for Thompkins him­self, he knows his target.

“I want the state cham­pionship,” he said about his best event, the 400 meters. “I think I’ll take it this year.”